The song appeared on the band’s fourth album, Eldorado, and it went on to become their first hit in the U.S., reaching No. 9 in November of that year. Lynne remembered believing it was a good song as soon as he’d created it, as he told Uncle Joe Benson on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show.

“I thought there was something special, because you had like a hypnotic sort of feel to it and it was quite repetitive as well,” he said. “But it still had lots of melody. I was very pleased because, just prior to that, my dad had said something – we were having an argument about something and he said, ‘That’s the trouble with your tunes.’ I said, ‘What is?’ He said, ‘They’ve got no bloody tune!’”

That sent Lynne into a creative frenzy. “So I said, ‘I’ll show you a tune then,’” he reported, and went on to write the bittersweet story of a man who has big dreams about a life with a women he knows he can never have, and about ambitions he knows will never come to fruition. Its success helped propel Eldorado to becoming the 16th best-selling album of 1974. “And that’s how I wrote that one,” he said, “just to show him I could write a tune!”

ELO – “Can’t Get It Out of My Head”

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